This blog exists to support liberatory collectivist activism that is anti-patriarchy, anti-colonialism, and anti-capitalism. It also seeks to center the experiences, theories, and agendas of radical and feminist women of color.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Events leading up to the shooting death of a seven-year-old girl at the hands of a Detroit officer may have been videotaped by a crime-reality series camera crew that was with police as they searched a family home for a homicide suspect.

I remember when "the OJ case" broke, and white Amerikkka refused to believe--REFUSED TO BELIEVE--that white het male supremacist police forces across the country DO NOT serve the African American community. They assault and harass the African American community, with tremendous force, gun power, might, local and State protection. I was younger and, in some sense, whiter. There was no question in my mind that O.J. Simpson murdered two people: his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson and the man who, along with Nicole, fought to stop him, Ron Goldman. I also have no trouble at all believing any husband has the privacy and institutionalised, and sometimes religion-backed power to murder their wive, or rape her, or abuse her in any number of ways. I believe O.J. Simpson murdered two people, and was a man who abused a woman, to death. And I believe the LAPD and many other police departments across the U.R.A., are racist as hell, and Arizona is going to continue to prove it. So, tragically, does this case here, in which a police officer fired into the home of a girl, killing her.

I doubt, though, that in fifteen or twenty years, white Amerikkka will remember the name of Aiyana Jones. Maybe that's partly because there are too many names Black girls and women murdered men, including by WHM supremacist police forces across the U.R.A. But I hope we do remember her and don't let her death be "just one more casualty"--for there is nothing casual at all about killing a girl. Will white history books tell the story of this "noncombatant" child paying the price The White Man has placed and kept over the head of each and every person of color to be forced onto or off of this land? Will her name go down in history as the case that broke loose the grip of the bloody strangling hands of white people who, I fear, won't let go until every last person of color is either enslaved or dead. With regard to Arizona's newest racist policies, Jessica Yee asked on a feminist magazine website what constitutes a social justice or human rights issue being feminist. I'm not qualified to answer that question, but I can say this, to every profeminist man out there: the murder of Black girls by white male supremacist police officers counts as a profeminist issue. Genocide and gynocide are bound to each other in practices and policies supported by whites and men in "my" country. How, one might ask, is the murder by the police of Aiyana Jones NOT a profeminist issue? And in what reality are these police officers and the ones who supported the bombing of MOVE members, not terrorists endangering the lives of U.S. citizens? And why won't the U.S. government respond with force against "our" terrorists the way they do, increasingly indiscriminately, against Black, Brown, Indigenous, Asian, and Arab people anywhere?

Click on the title just below to link back to where I first read this story, which is where the video above was found also.

DETROIT -- Police who carried out a raid on a family home that left a 7-year-old girl dead over the weekend were accompanied by a camera crew for a reality television show, and an attorney says video of the siege contradicts the police account of what happened.

Geoffrey Fieger, an attorney for the family of young Aiyana Jones, said he has seen three or four minutes of video of the raid, although he declined to say whether it was shot by the crew for the A&E series "The First 48," which has been shadowing Detroit homicide detectives for months.

Police have said officers threw a flash grenade through the first-floor window of the two-family home, and that an officer's gun discharged, killing the girl, during a struggle or after colliding with the girl's grandmother inside the home.

But Fieger said the video shows an officer lobbing the grenade and then shooting into the home from the porch.

"There is no question about what happened because it's in the videotape," Fieger said. "It's not an accident. It's not a mistake. There was no altercation."

"Aiyana Jones was shot from outside on the porch. The videotape shows clearly the officer throwing through the window a stun grenade-type explosive and then within milliseconds of throwing that, firing a shot from outside the home," he said.

A&E spokesman Dan Silberman said neither he nor anyone else from the network would comment about the case, and he denied a request by The Associated Press for the footage.

Detroit police were trying to obtain the film crew's footage, Assistant Chief Ralph Godbee said Monday.
Fieger said the investigation into what happened during the raid "needed to go no further than the videotape."

"The videotape shows clearly that the assistant police chief and the officers on the scene are engaging in an intentional cover up of the events," Fieger said. He said more than one camera was recording at the scene, and that the footage includes sound.

Police arrested the target of the raid, a 34-year-old man suspected of killing a 17-year-old boy, in the upstairs unit in the two-family home. Police had warrants to search both properties, and family members of the slain girl were seen going in and out of both on Monday. The suspect has not been charged, and it was not immediately clear what relationship he had to the slain girl.

The case has been handed over to the Michigan State Police to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy said Monday.

1 comment:

Thank you Radical Profeminist for posting this. I hope Aiyanna Jones's family put the pig behind bars for the rest of his life and sue DPD for millions of dollars in wrongful death and police brutality murder of Aiyanna Jones. No child, esp. a Black child, had to die brutally by the police that don't care about the lives of blacks period.